Forever Prisoners: How the United States Made the World’s Largest Immigration Detention System

FEATURING ELLIOTT YOUNG – The Trump administration’s immigrant family separation brought to light the horrors of the U.S.’s imprisonment of immigrants. But most Americans might be unaware that immigrant detention has a long and sordid history in the United States going back as far as the late nineteenth century. Many have challenged the application of the U.S. constitution to non-citizens, thereby greatly limiting the ability of those incarcerated to advocate for themselves and have any recourse for justice or freedom.

Elliott Young, Professor in the History Department at Lewis and Clark College. He is the author of Alien Nation: Chinese Migration in the Americas from the Coolie Era through WWII and Catarino Garza’s Revolution on the Texas-Mexico Border and co-editor of Continental Crossroads: Remapping US-Mexico Borderlands History. He is co-founder of the Tepoztlan Institute for Transnational History of the Americas. He has also provided expert witness testimony for over 200 asylum cases. His new book is called Forever Prisoners: How the United States Made the World’s Largest Immigration Detention System.